The Black Lives Matter movement has accomplished this past week
one of the things it does best: Expose how clumsy major
politicians can be when they talk about race.

Last weekend, activists upstaged former Maryland Gov. Martin
O'Malley (D) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) at the
progressive Netroots Nation convention, demanding that the
Democratic presidential candidates address the death of a black woman who allegedly committed
suicide in police custody, where she was being held for a
minor traffic violation.

"We are in a state of emergency," a Black Lives Matter Activist
who identified herself as Patrice said, as
O'Malley looked on somewhat awkwardly. "And if you don't know
that emergency, you are not human."

"What will you do to stop police unions battering our names after
their law enforcement kills us?" Patrice said.

Both presidential candidates stumbled over their answers.

O'Malley was forced to apologize after he said, "Black lives
matter, white lives matter, all lives matter," a point that many
activists view as dismissive of the unique problem of police
violence against African-Americans.

Sanders ran into similar trouble when he refused to engage with
activists after they interrupted his speech on income inequality.
He threatened to walk offstage and appeared visibly agitated that
protesters had interrupted his speech.

"Black lives matter. But I’ve spent 50 years of my life fighting
for civil rights. If you don’t want me to be here, that’s OK,"
Sanders said.

It was a perfect moment for the movement. In exposing how
unprepared two candidates who are trying to run to Hillary
Clinton's left were to answer a question about race and policing,
the Black Lives Matter activists showed that neither party is
perfectly prepared to answer key questions about race relations.

But looking at the numbers, it's not surprising that neither
O'Malley nor Sanders was prepared to deal with those questions.

That's because both candidates have been campaigning hard for
Democratic primary voters who are much less concerned about
issues related to race than many other hot-button issues
affecting Americans.

Though he's tried to recover from Netroots by featuring race and
social-justice issues more prominently in his stump speeches,
some Black Lives Matter activists have also been wary of some
Sanders supporters' attempts to co-opt the Black Lives Matter
movement.

Dear White Progressives,
Black people don't HAVE to support Bernie or anyone. You don't own us & we don't owe you ANYTHING
#BernieSoBlack

"It erased the founders of #BlackLivesMatter, civil-rights
leaders, and all those fighting for Black Lives before Bernie,"
Zellie Imani, a community organizer and blogger for
Black-culture.com, told Business Insider.

O'Malley hasn't found himself in much of a better position to
speak out about social-justice issues.

O'Malley kicked off his campaign earlier this year in Baltimore,
only weeks after protests and riots rocked the city in response
to the death of an unarmed black man who suffered fatal injuries
while in police custody. As mayor of Baltimore in the early
2000s,
O'Malley oversaw a "zero-tolerance" police crackdown aimed at
lowering the city's violent-crime rates, which some local
political figures claim led to increased tensions.

"We still have men who are suffering from it today,” Marvin "Doc"
Cheathem, a past president of the Baltimore branch of the NAACP,
told The Washington Post recently. "The guy
is good at talking, but a lot of us know the real story of the
harm he brought to our city."

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has taken notice. During
a Facebook chat with supporters on Monday, she ended up answering questions from a number of
journalists — including The Washington Post's Wesley Lowery,
who asked her what she would have said to the protesters to whom
her rivals were unprepared to talk.

"Black lives matter. Everyone in this country should stand firmly
behind that," she said.

Three days later, she delivered perhaps her most blunt remarks to
date about race during a campaign swing through South Carolina,
saying the country must confront "systemic racism." Again, she
twice invoked the "black lives matter" manta.

But many activists say that Clinton, too, needs to show what
she'll do to improve the lives of African-Americans and decrease
law-enforcement violence against African-Americans, rather than
simply express solidarity.

Frustrated with the Democratic response, many Black Lives Matter
activists warn that Democrats should not take their voices and
votes for granted after African-Americans turned out to vote in
droves for President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

"For decades the Democratic Party based their strategy on
assumption of receiving the black vote without accountability to
black voters," Imani told Business Insider. "But the youth have
found their voice, and found that their voice is strong. No
candidate, Democratic or Republican, will campaign without having
to publicly address their position sooner of later on their
campaign trail."

But if activists do decide to abandon the Democratic Party, it's
not clear that they'll find many allies on the Republican side.

The same Bloomberg poll of Iowans shows that Republican primary
voters have little desire to talk about race relations. When
asked about 20 high-profile issues, GOP primary voters ranked
race relations second to last among topics that they want
presidential candidates to talk about. The only topic that polled
lower was climate change.